108 Islam and Modernity
achieved in the creation of a national state prior to the Marxist seizure of power
in 1978, others maintain that the nation-state framework was a fabrication that
sat ill with the realities of Afghan society. Kakar (1978: 202) noted that there
was a genuine period of nation-building during the constitutional period. ‘No
longer was national politics pursued effectively in terms of region, religion, tribe
or kinship affi nity. The various modern types of political ideologies and align-
ments transcended these traditional lines.’ Before the dislocation occasioned by
years of protracted confl ict, the bonds of citizenship were arguably strength-
ened through education, inter-marriage and service in the national army at the
expense of ethnic/tribal affi liation (Wardak 2004). Edwards (1996: 4), on the
other hand, draws our attention to ‘the absence of a moral discourse of state-
hood shared by the majority of its citizens’, which, alongside external infl uences,
accounts for the incoherence and fragmentation of the polity. Saikal (2004),
likewise, interprets the various modern ideologies espoused by consecutive state
elites (such as constitutionalism and socialism) as a thin veneer over an untrans-
formed political culture constituted by implicit beliefs, kinship norms, codes of
accepted behaviour and hierarchies of identity. The weakness of the national
bond outside the capital and urban centres was noted by several scholars, who
suggested that the supranational umma (the community of believers) and the
subnational qawm (tribe) constituted more salient registers of identity (various
contributions in R. Tapper (ed.) 1983).
The genealogies of the modern state are clearly crucial. Barfi eld (2004)
reminds us that, under Abdur Rahman Khan (1880–1901), considered the
founder of the modern Afghan state, the subjugation of all autonomous groups
took place by means of a British-subsidised army that centralised power in
Kabul and made the government Pashtun rather than merely dynastic. The
Pashtunisation policies that were intrinsic to state-building are held responsible
by some for sowing the seeds of social fragmentation (Shahrani 1988, 1998).
Furthermore, the penetration of the central government into rural peripheries
arguably created an even greater gulf between the representatives of the state,
operating through a range of local intermediaries (such as maliks, khans and arbabs),
and the masses, since the former were generally seen as predatory and corrupt.
Roy (1986: 10) even argued that the uprisings against the communist regime,
which broke out from 1978 and led to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, were
directed ‘as much against the state itself as against the Marxist government’. It is
easy to concede, without having to take the argument that far, that the multiple
fault lines of the Afghan polity fi nally imploded during the war years. It is not
my intention to rehearse the various phases of confl ict in the period following
the Soviet withdrawal and leading to the ascendancy of the Taliban. Suffi ce it to
say that the state was fi nally fragmented and bases of social power transformed
as the economy changed from a subsistence and local trade economy into a
warlord economy dominated by commercial agriculture (opium poppies) and